WEC Statement on Comptroller Audit of the Economic Development Authority

WEC Statement on Comptroller Audit of the Economic Development Authority

January 9, 2018

A report released earlier today by the state comptroller confirms what the NJ Work Environment Council (WEC) and our partners have been educating on and advocating around for decades: that our economy in the United States, and in New Jersey, is rigged to benefit the ultra-rich.

The report, which detailed a vast failure of oversight and implementation in the state Economic Development Authority’s (EDA) tax incentive program, found that the EDA could not identify if the $11 billion of incentives given out since 2005, which went to highly profitable corporations,generated any economic benefit to the state. That’s $11 billion which could have gone to building New Jersey’s communities.

But New Jersey’s economic system, our tax code, and our policies are very often not written for us. They are written to dish out corporate welfare, so that wealthy executives can line their pockets while destroying jobs, failing to stimulate or contribute meaningfully to our economy, and polluting our environment.

Workers and taxpayers have felt this at every turn- as our state government bends over backwards to please corporations and moneyed interests, in hopes that they will somehow save our economy, our wages remain stagnate, our working conditions fail to improve, and our public infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

It is time we demand an economic development plan in New Jersey which values and puts first the workers who do the building, and who make up our communities and our state. Any plan which puts the interest of corporate owners before the vast majority of New Jersey’s families and workers is a failure.

WEC denounces the actions of the EDA under the Christie administration, and will stand with our allies in demanding a more just economic development plan in the coming years.